Machete

Sorry for the downtime between posts but my computer somehow broke itself in the overhead bin during my flight back to Montreal.  Until I get it repaired I won't be updating every day, but I 'll try to do it as much as possible.

As for Machete, this review is going to be a little less in depth as I watched the movie about a week ago, and I didn't take any notes on the film.  Fortunately, Machete wasn't exactly a movie I needed to focus on details with.  The movie is a take on 70's exploitation cinema and it deals with the border between Mexico and the United States.  Machete is an ex-federale who ends up as an illegal immigrant in Texas.  When he is given the job of killing a Senator he ends up tangled in the life he left behind.  His only mission now is revenge on those who have wronged him.  The film follows Machete on this bloody path he is forced on.

As with any Robert Rodriguez film, we are treated to plenty of gore and off-the-wall violence.  I actually found that the violence in the film was a lot tamer than I thought it would be.  I can think of two points in the film that reached the level of bloodshed that I was expecting.  I won't reveal these because I feel that my description wouldn't do them justice, and it's the kind of thing that is better experienced first hand.  In this sense, I often felt the movie was a little uneven.  This wasn't a film that was fighting between being serious and being over the top, it is clearly the latter.  However, Rodriguez seemed to have trouble generating some really unique action sequences.  I know that it's a throwback film, but I did feel like some of the gore was just dialed in.  If it weren't for the two sequences I mentioned before, I would have just written the movie off as a regular sub par action movie.  With these in the film, you could see evidence of that craziness, but it was never really followed up by anything.  I find with these kinds of movies, I really enjoy myself when the film continues to top itself.  This simply didn't happen for me in Machete.  There is really no build-up to the big pay-offs, and the finale I found pretty lackluster to be perfectly honest.  Those big two examples I mentioned weren't built up to either, they just kind of happened.  I felt this was also true in regards to the references to exploitation cinema.  A few times Rodriguez chose to frame the shot poorly or have a pornographic reference in the film.  This worked with the throwback idea, but they just felt scattered.  It wasn't as though the whole movie was using these referential techniques, but just these few sections.  Because of this, I really felt that they weren't necessary.

I really liked a few of the casting choices in the film.  Danny Trejo was fine as Machete, but he didn't stand out too much to me.  He was playing a B-movie character, so I'm sure his direction went towards not being too much of an actor, which he pulled off fine.  The two people who I thought were great were Steven Seagal and Robert De Niro.  Seagal was perfect for his role as Torrez, Machete's arch-nemesis.  I'm a bit of a sucker for Seagal just for how notoriously bad his movies tend to be.  With Machete, I felt that he fully embraced that and even added his own bit of panache to complete the role.  I'd even venture to say that it was a well acted part, Seagal only overdid it where it was necessary, and it all came together in a really fun way.  De Niro was great because it was so crazy seeing him as the Texan Senator.  Something seems a bit off at first, but if you follow his actiosn closely you can see where he is taking the role.  I would say more but I don't want to reveal anything.  It isn't a huge spoiler, but I thought it was a really interesting aspect of De Niro's character.

My biggest complaint about the film is once again about the gore.  This shouldn't come as a huge surprise since this film is pretty much just a showcase of violence with a thin narrative to cover it.  Before anyone snaps at me for that statement, I know there is are actual issues that are dealt with in the film, but honestly they aren't what the movie is about.  I happened to stumble on Robocop on one of the movie channels a few hours after I watched the movie, and as it is one of my favorite movies I sat down to watch it again.  I thought it was an interesting movie to compare to Machete because I absolutely love the special effects in Robocop.  In Machete the big thing I noticed was the use of CGI for a lot of the bloody scenes.  There was one point in the film where someone was lying on the ground and then they got shot in the head.  With the digital effects it looked absolutely awful.  The mist of blood completely obscured everything so it was impossible to get any sort of shock out of it.  It just looked like something magically turned this person's head into red vapor.  Now I'm a huge supporter of the use of actual physical objects for special effects.  I can't stress how much better something looks when it actually is real.  That shot could have been done infinitely better with a painted watermelon wearing a wig.  I could reference the opening of Robocop, but my favorite scene in that film is when one of the Boddicker's gang gets covered in toxic waste and then hit by a car.  Both the effect of the toxic waste and the car accident are done with no digital effects, and they look incredible.  These techniques are barely used in Machete and I think the film really suffers for it.  As a throwback film, I don't really see why they chose to go with almost all digital special effects.  I thought it would have served the whole theme of the movie a lot better if they went with some non-digital special effects, and it also would have pleased me a lot more.

I'll save my rant about CGI for another post and wrap this one up here.  I don't really feel it's necessary to give any sort of recommendation for Machete.  I think that if you know Robert Rodriguez and you know the subject matter you'll be able to determine if it's a movie for you.  Sorry again for the slow updates, but I'll hopefully do another post this weekend.



If you have any comments feel free to leave some feedback and thanks for reading.